Once in Calcutta, Wellesley played the proconsul, parading in a fancy carriage and with an armed retinue, building a new resplendent Government House and pursuing sexual escapades. Asia had changed since Clive’s day: a Sikh
Wizened, wrinkly and tiny with a high voice, Agha Muhammad Khan had been castrated at five by Nader Shah’s nephew to prevent any threat from his Qajar tribe, and was then kept as a prisoner at court for decades until 1779 when a change of regime enabled the eunuch to escape, raise his tribal army and conquer Shiraz, Isfahan and Tabriz. When he pivoted into Khorasan he captured Nader’s blind grandson, Shahrokh, personally torturing him by filling his crown with molten lead. He had the body buried under the doorway of the palace in his new capital, Teheran. In 1791, he invaded the Caucasus, expelling Russian forces and recapturing Yerevan. When he took Kumani, he had the eyeballs of its 20,000 people gouged out and collected in heaps.
In August 1795, he attacked Georgia, where its king Hercules II, who had served in Nader’s entourage, begged Catherine the Great for protection. Just before she died, Catherine abandoned Georgia. In September the eunuch routed Hercules and razed Tbilisi, building towers of bodies before taking 15,000 slaves back to Teheran, where he was crowned shah.
His reign was short. In June 1797, when he heard his valets arguing, he sentenced two of them to death but put off the executions until the next morning. Overnight they crept into the royal tent and stabbed him. But the monster had united Iran: his successor, his nephew Fath-Ali Shah, held it together, and the family ruled until 1925.
While the Persians, Afghans and Sikhs were busy in the east, Wellesley was determined to be the founder of the British empire in India where the British were just one part of a cosmopolitan melange of Europeans and Indians who mixed together on equal terms: one in three Britons on the subcontinent were married to Indian women. In Hyderabad, where the British ensured the Nizam did not ally with the French, the British Resident (representative), James Kirkpatrick, was married to the beautiful princess Khair-un-Nissa. Wellesley was said to disapprove, but he focused on Britain’s chief enemy, Mysore, a kingdom recently carved out of the southern Vijayanagar empire by a warlord, Haidar Ali Khan. His French-trained son Sultan Tipu, a tigerish showman whose sultanate was known for its social stability, economic prosperity and harmony between Hindu and Muslim citizens, hired French officers to conquer the Carnatic and Malabar and defeated a British army – believing the French would back him. But they let him down. Having succeeded in ‘drawing the Beast of the jungle into the toils’, Wellesley unleashed his brother Arthur, who stormed Seringapatam and killed Tipu. Wellesley used Mysore to turn on the Marathas. In September 1803, at Assaye, General Arthur Wellesley defeated the maharaja of Gwalior, which he later regarded as a greater victory than Waterloo – ‘the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw’ – while in the north another British army defeated the Marathas, commanded by French officers, outside Delhi, which then joined the British sphere. Many of the rulers, including the Mughal emperor, were allowed to rule while the British controlled foreign policy. India had frequently been conquered by war bands from the east, but this was its first conquest by a sea power – and it gave Britain mass and span. By the time Wellesley arrived home with a marquessate and £100,000, the real architect of the British Raj had more than doubled London’s territories and planned to become prime minister. Arthur too entered politics.
Further east, the EIC again tried to penetrate China, the most powerful Asian state, ruled by the octogenarian Qianlong, emperor of 300 millions, who had expanded Chinese power into central Asia: the biggest ever Chinese empire. But he had lived too long and suffered from the success curse: past success makes present reform unthinkable.* The trade balance was vastly in China’s favour, with the British, confined to Canton, paying in silver, but the EIC hoped to pay for Chinese tea with a new Indian crop, opium. In September 1792, they dispatched an envoy, Earl Macartney, to request ‘a small unfortified island for the residence of British traders’.
